Now Brit Hume makes stuff up

November 11, 2008 7:48 AM EST ›››
ERIC BOEHLERT

It's all part of the GOP spin regarding WaPo ombudsman's Sunday column and how she somehow confirmed the press has gone easy on Obama and was too tough on McCain. Hume claims the ombudsman "acknowledged the bias."

As we noted a couple times already, the "tilt" that the ombudsman referenced in her column about campaign coverage was that the Post, during the general election, printed slightly more Obama-centric articles than McCain-centric ones. And that the Post ran slightly more Obama photos than McCain photos. The WaPo made no evaluation about whether those stories and photos were "bias." (i.e. pro or con.) The paper simply added up the raw numbers.

But Republicans took that and ran with the (misleading) idea that because the Post published more Obama stories that meant it was bias in his favor.

Read that again. According to right-wing press critics, the fact that the Post and other press outlets produced more Obama coverage meant they really, really liked him. The GOP has been very clear in that the sheer quantity of the Obama campaign stories was confirmation that the press liked Obama because the press ignored McCain.

Ok, now apply that to the amount of coverage to the vice presidential candidates received because every independent study has shown that the press practically drowned Sarah Palin in press coverage while ignoring Joe Biden. For most of the general election, "Biden was practically an afterthought, struggling to generate headlines and attention," concluded the Pew Research Center.

So according to conservative press critics' logic, it's obvious that the press, which couldn't stop writing about Palin, showed "bias" in favor of the Alaska governor, right? But for some reason, that's not the conclusion Hume came to.